


Queen of Spades

by kittykatthetacodemon



Series: Luck of the Draw [2]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, I mean technically they die but they don't stay dead so, Necromancy, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:43:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8416114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittykatthetacodemon/pseuds/kittykatthetacodemon
Summary: Emma Cullen can raise the dead.  It's not a big deal, until Bogue's hand is on her shoulder and her husband is dying in the street.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This will probably not make much sense if you don't read the first work in the series.
> 
> ART BY [RageBear](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RageBear/pseuds/RageBear)

From as early as she could remember, Emma Cullen had known what she was.

It wasn’t like she’d set out to make a secret of it.  Out west, gifts were more common than they’d ever been, or so said her parents, who’d picked up stakes and moved everything they could carry from their old Virginia home while Emma was nothing more than a thought in her mother’s belly.  Strange gifts were more common, too, and more easily accepted.  Oftentimes, little communities prided themselves on the more unusual gifts, treating them like a draw and an attraction, one more reason their half-baked town should earn a place on the map.

But even as a child, Emma had known there was something different about her powers.  For one thing, people spoke about the gift sometimes like they didn’t speak about others—always in hushed tones, always leaning in like they were imparting some dark secret.  Dead-walkers, folks called them, sometimes with morbid awe, more often with distaste-turned-disgust-turned-fear.  Only Emma’s mother called them necromancers, and she always made sure to say that they surely weren’t all bad folk, that their powers could probably do some good in the world.  She never quite looked Emma in the eyes when she said it.

So somehow Emma never got around to mentioning it, though it was always there, seeping and twisting under her skin.

* * *

Once in a while, she let herself go out into the back garden and practice.  She only tried little stuff, at first—bugs and worms, crickets, even the little lizards and birds that their cat caught and left for them up on the back porch.  The smaller things were hard, like trying to lift herself up into the highest branches of the big gnarled oak in the center of town with nothing but her fingertips.  The bigger things were easier, somehow, like swimming in mud rather than being buried in it.

Sometimes she wondered what it’d be like to use it on a person.  Surely that would be easier still, and there were deaths in town now and again, mostly old folks reaching their time—she could always try.  But her growing sense for death told her as surely as her common sense that it was a bad idea.

Those who died a natural death deserved their rest.  She’d never try to drag a person back unwilling, and certainly not just for simple curiosity.

* * *

Something in her, something dark and still and a little bit cruel—that thing whispered that there would come a time and place where she could use her powers without qualms and without regret.  It whispered that someone would go unwilling; it told her she’d be there, ready, if only she would wait.

It wasn’t exactly morbid.  It wasn’t even really ill-wishing.  After all, every child learned that one day, everyone would die.

The only difference was that death was what Emma had been born for.

* * *

She had her first chance to bring back the dead at sixteen.

It was a case of wrong place, right time; she was visiting the town’s doctor, a sweet old man with a gift for herbalism and some minor hands-on healing.  In his kitchen, talking with him and his wife, she’d not expected the Pritcher boys to come bashing through the door, carrying poor Tommy Kuntz like a sack of wheat.  All the while, his sister Sarah wailed in the background—a sudden surprise of noise and sound.

Tommy looked like he’d been through a wheat thresher—and indeed he had been.  He was more shredded than whole, and the blood seemed to be coming from just about everywhere.  He gurgled as he fought for breath, horrible heaving sounds, and Emma didn’t need her sense for death to know there wasn’t much even a doctor could do for him.

Still, the doctor made a go of it, and his gift was enough to close up most of Tommy’s new holes as he pressed his hands and herbs against each bleeding piece.  It was messy, dirty work, and the worst wounds were hard to find under all the blood.  It was made worse all the while by Sarah Kuntz screaming in the background, adding an edge of hysteria to the proceedings.  Partway through closing up one gaping chest wound, Tommy shuddered and just—stopped.

Emma felt him go, like the feeling of a rope snapping under her hands.  Even before Doc looked up, and before he said a word, she knew.

“Do something!” Sarah screamed, all the terror of a little sister.  “Why aren’t you _doing something_?”

The doctor looked at her kindly, but he was already shaking his head.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “There’s nothing we can do.”

“No,” Emma interrupted, suddenly sure, “wait.”

Sarah rounded on her with all the fury she could muster.  “Wait?” she shrieked.  “He’s dying!”

“No,” Emma said, absent-minded this time as she gestured for Doc to step away from what was left of Tommy on the floor.  Doc stared at her, but finally backed off.  “He’s already dead.”

There was a creeping cold rising in her bones; there was an ache that she recognized, that she had somehow always known.  Sarah started screaming again, but Emma tuned her out.  _Hush_ , her power whispered to her, or maybe she whispered to it, to Sarah.  _Be still_.

Any urgency she had felt was fading, the adrenaline and horror of the scene slipping away as she reached within herself.  After all, there was no longer any rush.  The man was already dead.

That snapping rope, that fraying ribbon—that was Tommy, not the corpse-shell lying in blood on the floor.  When she reached out, she could follow the trail of those threads, already dimming, leading out of the body and into somewhere between.  Beyond that, there was a gate; beyond that, there was—

Her gift rose up under her skin, dark and cold and still.  There were those who said their powers pulsed within them, pounding to the beat of their hearts, but she had never expected anything of the sort.  Her power sucked in heat, sucked in movement, sucked in light.  It felt like creeping darkness, like nothingness if nothingness was as purple-black as any bruise, and at first she thought she was imagining it when it began to swirl out of her, filling up the kitchen and seeping through the blood on once-clean floors.

This was nothing like lizards and crickets, nothing like the little broken-neck birds that she had coaxed into flying away.  A man was nothing like a cricket, nothing like a bird.  He had thoughts.  He had a will.  And that was the point that those not like her would never understand, never trust—they saw this as a violation or perversion of nature.  In some cases, she might even agree, because there was nothing more horrifying to consider than a spirit dragged back against its will, or a corpse reanimated but empty of its designated host.  There was a point beyond her reach.  There were lines she’d set for herself, ones she’d never cross.

This, though, _this—_ she sighed out more purple-black darkness, pressing down where her hands had found the wounds in his chest—this was recent.  This was life stolen without permission, against his will, out of his time.  He was not gone, not yet, just distant and confused, his life-threads detached but not destroyed.

She pushed down.  She reached out.  She _asked_.

He reached back.

* * *

She left that town just six weeks later, narrow-eyed suspicion and misguided jealousy following her at every turn.  What unnatural thing might she try next?  (With her gift, why had she saved Tommy, but allowed so many others to stay dead?)

Only Tommy Kuntz himself had ever thanked her, stitched back together and alive as ever before.  “You asked if I wanted to live,” he told her, earnest.  The worst of his scarring would never go away, despite the doctor’s best efforts.  “You let me _choose_.  What else would I need?”

* * *

She decided she hated the term _dead-walker_.  No dead man had ever walked, and under her direction, no _dead_ man ever would.

She spoke to the dead.  She asked that one, vital question.  And sometimes, she grabbed them up with both hands and pulled them home.

* * *

Matthew Cullen was a charmer.  He had a pretty face, pretty hair, pretty smile—the girls swooned when he walked past.  But it was his voice that was the real gift, soft and smooth as honey, enough to draw anyone in and get them to listen.

With his power, he could make any man do anything, even those things he didn’t want to do.  But, he told Emma, he wouldn’t.

“It’s not for me to decide for them,” he told her.

She fell in love with him that very moment.

When she told him her gift, he just shrugged his shoulders and asked if she’d be willing to tell him what it was like.  He never once judged or feared her, and that felt like everything.

She married him, and life was good.

* * *

And then there was Rose Creek, and Bogue, and Matthew dying in the street.  She raised him up, laughing and crying all at once as he jolted back to life under her hands.

“I love you,” she said, and he kissed her.

He kissed her, and told her he loved her, too, and then Bogue’s hand was on her shoulder, and Matthew was dying all over again, and her world came to an end.

Would it have been better or worse if she had never used her gift on him at all?

* * *

Her power was gone.

Her power was gone, and that meant no gift, no death-sense, no trailing threads of light and being to follow back—no gates to open, and nothing to beckon home.  When her husband died, she didn’t even get to see the last of his life slip away, blind to his ending like she’d never been, not once in her entire life.

Doc had to be the one to tell her he was gone.

* * *

So, then, there was only this: only righteousness.  Only revenge, ugly and raw.  Only hiking up her skirts and riding out, because she might be damn capable and unashamed of her choices, but she was only one woman, and she didn’t intend to die stupid before she could make Bogue pay.

* * *

She’d set out for an army, and returned home with seven men in tow.  It was insanity, pure and simple, to think that alone would make a difference—but riding into town and seeing the devastation those seven men had managed against more than twenty, she thought they might just have a chance.

* * *

They had seven men, and seven days to save the town.

Chisolm was the steadiest of the bunch, smart and calm and capable.  His gift sharpened him, gave him a bit of an edge.  It ensured that nothing and no one could ever surprise him, and his position as a lawman gave him that inch of respectability that made him safe to trust.

Billy was quiet, but in the way that a loaded gun was quiet—the promise of violence lurked around the edges, even in the most peaceful moments.  It didn’t much worry her; there was nothing cruel in him.  He lurked at Goody’s shoulder like a shadow, and Goodnight Robicheaux never once looked up and seemed surprised to find him there.  In fact, most often he just smiled, a little quirk of the lips that seemed unaccountably private.  In his turn, Goody talked big, all grandiose sweeps of his hands and full-body expressions, sleepy-eyed and softly polite as any southern gentleman until someone insulted him or his.  Billy kept Goody grounded, and Goody kept Billy from getting swallowed up by the rest of the world.

Horne was partway along the road to losing his goddamn mind, plain and simple.  But he was a fighter, and his voice was soft enough to be soothing, even while his words themselves sometimes made no sense.  She knew enough to know he would rather cut off his own hands than hurt anyone who didn’t deserve his rage.

Red Harvest was quiet, helpful, and good-natured, inasmuch as she knew anything about him at all.  He kept to himself, relying on Chisolm to say whatever he needed whenever he needed to say it.  His lightning was a force to reckon with, she could tell, and standing too close to him sometimes felt like standing and waiting for a thunderstorm to strike.

Vasquez unsettled her at first.  The first impression had not been promising; his mind-gift made her skin crawl.  But gradually, as enough time passed, she watched him settle, like an animal made skittish by too much time in the wild would settle after enough time back inside in the warmth.  He would do, she decided, and stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Sharp and ever-shifting, Faraday flirted and leered and called her a dead-walker, but he also was the first to accept her right to this fight, to her own revenge.  During the big fight, brushing the bottom of her ammo pouch, she found one of his cards, folded carefully into quarters and tucked away.

Later, when everything was over, she took the chance to examine it more closely.  It was the queen of spades—the Bedpost Queen, the Widow Queen.  More likely, in his mind, it was the queen of spades and shovels and dirt, of graves dug shallow so that the once-dead could claw their way to the surface and walk again.

She couldn’t help but think Matthew would have liked them all.

* * *

Bogue died quick and easy, like any coward crawling along the floor on his belly, just before he could take advantage of the way Chisolm was attempting to draw the whole thing out.  Chisolm, stiffening, looked up at her, caught somewhere between shame and defiance—but she just looked steadily back at him.  Where was the room for judgement between them?

With his death came the return of her powers, that creeping darkness in her bones a comforting and familiar ache.  Bogue—dead against his will, out of his time—was reaching out in her senses, his life-threads still near enough to grasp and drag him back.

She handed her rifle to Chisolm, and walked away without another glance.

Let him rot.

* * *

Faraday, the self-sacrificing idiot, brought to mind Tommy Kuntz, reminded her of that very first brutal death-scene.  He was more blood than anything else, more patchwork than man; Doc, grim-faced and disturbed, had to fight his gift against stiffening dead flesh to claw him back together some before she’d even begin.  There was no use trying to call life back to a body as ravaged as that, not when it would only kill him all over again.

The still-living townsfolk, waiting for her to raise their own loved ones, waited a little ways back.  Goody wouldn’t leave Billy, who like Horne was sleeping off Doc’s quick-fix healing, and Red Harvest was still off helping the townsfolk gather up their dead, which meant it was only Chisolm and Vasquez leaning over her and the body as she went to work.  Chisolm, bless him, left her to it, but Vasquez was a steely-eyed shadow clawing at her back, his mind-gift a lurking sense of something awful that she didn’t much want to define.

She ignored that, because she had to.

Whatever Bogue had done in taking her gift, it seemed to have made her—not more powerful, exactly, because whatever it was lurking under her skin was no different than it had ever been.  It was simply more present, and she was more—aware—of it all, of what it was and what she could do with it.

But on to the task at hand: Faraday was very, very dead.  Decay had already begun—that was inevitable—but when she twisted a hand, her power seeping out from under skin, that decay ground to a stuttering halt before falling away entirely.  Her other hand reached out, grabbing the loose threads of his life and wrapping them around her fingers.

There were the gates.  There was the beyond-place.  And there was Faraday, who listened to Emma’s question and seemed to shrug more than anything else.

She reached out.  He—accepted it, but didn’t seem much inclined to pull himself back out.

“Stubborn asshole,” she hissed.  Vasquez’s mind-gift sputtered angrily at her; she slammed back focused irritation.  She didn’t need any interruptions.

Well, she had consent, and she had her gift, blooming purple-black in the air like the worst sort of wildflower.  She had his soul-threads, his life tangled in her hands.  Ignoring the way Vasquez and some of the watching townsfolk started shouting, she got up to straddle Faraday’s chest.  Nobody tried to stop her, which was all that mattered.  And then, holding him down, she yanked his soul-threads back from the other-place, returned them to their tethers, and knotted them in place.

His heart beat once, twice.

It was not beautiful.  It was not a moment of grace or miracles.  It was congealing blood forcing itself through stopped veins; it was stiffening limbs jerking back against the rigor mortis.  It was an ugly, faltering thing, coming back from the dead.

His heart beat one more time and then stopped.  But it was enough, it had to be—he had proved his will to live—so she leaned down, pried open his jaw, and pressed her mouth to his.  It felt like the worst sort of mockery, nothing like a kiss at all, just brutal efficiency as she pushed air and purple-black smoke directly into his lungs.  The stubborn bastard didn’t move.  She thought she might be shouting at him, adding to the chaos of everyone shouting back at her, but that was meaningless still.  She leaned down and breathed again.

Faraday jerked, his heart moving back to a normal rhythm, lungs following a moment behind, and her gift faded away like it had never been.  That was as it should be, then.

What could she do for him now?  He was alive.

A moment for relief, and then—he _screamed_.

* * *

Vasquez tossed her aside like a sack of potatoes, and she couldn’t find it in herself to blame him.

After all, the man underneath her was screaming like he was dying all over again, and Vasquez had the power to help with that, to draw some of that hurt out from under his skin.  It didn’t much explain why Vasquez was murmuring soft and sweet in Spanish, or why he was touching Faraday like he was something fragile, something that he could break.  It didn’t explain the twisted-soft ache in his mind-touch, and it certainly didn’t explain why Faraday had quieted almost the moment he’d opened his eyes and realized who it was looking down on him—that was relief on his face, pure and simple, and it wasn’t relief from the pain.

So maybe it explained everything.  Emma thought about Matthew, about how easy and right it had felt to lean down and kiss him when he’d breathed again under her touch after that first death.  Here and now, Vasquez curled his hands around Faraday’s jaw and smiled, breathtaking and heartbreaking in the same moment, and Emma suddenly couldn’t see much difference between the two.

 _Oh_ , she thought.  _Oh_.  She left them to it, and ushered the other witnesses away, back to the steadily growing line of fresh corpses awaiting her attention.  The living could deal with themselves in their own time; she moved with conviction about her own work.

She didn’t hurry.  There was plenty of time for saving all the ones who chose to be saved.  After all, they were already dead.

**Author's Note:**

> This is it before November, I swear. Probably. I seem to have misplaced my self-control somewhere

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Queen of Spades](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8637676) by [MistMarauder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistMarauder/pseuds/MistMarauder)




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